Monday, April 27, 2009

Facebook Open Stream API

Facebook today announced an important step toward greater openness through Facebook Platform. For the first time, facebook is opening the core Facebook product experience - the stream - with the new Facebook Open Stream API.

The home page design centralizes the stream of information that tells you what's going on right now in the world around you. With the Facebook Open Stream API users will be able to use applications to read and interact with their stream. As a Facebook developer you'll also be able to access the posts you've published into the stream and display them in your application, whether it's on a mobile device, Web site or desktop.

To enable developers to access the stream, facebook has built the Facebook Open Stream API to include the emerging Activity Streams standard.

“Over the last several months, we've been collaborating with the community, hosting meetups at Facebook headquarters, and speaking at industry events about Activity Streams and the open stack. We think that working alongside our peers to create an open standard for accessing and consuming streams is the future. We'll continue to make contributions to the standards community and related technologies and are happy to be one of the first companies to implement Activity Streams at scale.” said Ray C. He on facebook news page.

In addition to the Activity Streams interface, the Open Stream API includes robust new APIs called stream.get and stream.publish and new FQL tables that enable you to directly access the stream. With these new methods, you can access the stream on behalf of a user and then filter, remix, and display the stream back to that user however you choose, wherever you choose, in the manner most relevant for the user experience. Other new API methods will allow users to both publish into the stream and to add comments and "likes" to posts in the stream.

All Facebook Platform terms governing data use apply and an application or Facebook Connect site can only access a user's view of the stream if the user gives the application permission.

Facebook created a sample client application, Facebook for Adobe AIR. It's built on Adobe AIR runtime and includes all of the APIs that released today. Before you can use the application, you need to install Adobe AIR. Then, you can either download the official Facebook for Adobe AIR application or you can compile your own copy, which is available in public repository.